7 - Beautiful Destructions: The Filmic Aesthetics of Spectacular Catastrophes

Summary

WHEN I BEGAN TO CONCEPTUALIZE this chapter, I came across a film that does not deal at all with disasters, but then again, maybe it does. To quote a short dialogue from the film without contextualizing it:

Jake: “You know I love you baby! I wouldn't leave you. It wasn't my fault.”

The Woman (who doesn't have a name in the film): “You're a miserable slug. You think you can talk your way out of this now? You betrayed me!”

Jake (pleading): “No I didn't, honest! I ran out of gas! I had a flat tire! I didn't have enough money for cab fare! My tux didn't come back from the cleaners! An old friend came in from out of town! Someone stole my car! There was an earthquake! A terrible flood! Locusts! It wasn't my fault! I swear to God!”

What is at stake in this scene? A scorned woman (with a machine gun in her hands) confronts the man who didn't show up for their wedding, and the man pleads innocent because, at least so runs his argument, one incident after the other, one natural catastrophe bigger than the other, prevented him from arriving at their wedding. The quoted scene is from The Blues Brothers(1980). I am neither interested in the film nor whether the different occurrences that Jake narrates as disasters really prevented him from making it to his own wedding. What I am interested in is how the film uses in this sequence natural disasters as alibis or excuses for a particular behavior. Clearly these excuses cannot be taken seriously because the film follows its genre's conventions as a musical comedy; nonetheless, they employ a narrative strategy that is worth examining: the viewer faces in this scene the breaking off of a wedding as so dramatic an event that it can only be excused owing to an earthquake or a flood (or even better, both). But if natural disasters can become narrative tropes that follow a logic of accumulation or escalation that are then used to cover up something (the reality of Jake fleeing the wedding in The Blues Brothers), I wonder if disaster films can therefore be interpreted as narrative excesses that hide something else.